When an AMOS translator encounters an English short sentence or single word English language string, that can be either a verb or a noun (or otherwise have two differnet meanings), I think the translator can:
- Send a message/Email to Helen Foster, She has been extremely helpful, kind and quick to reply.
- Submit the string to the en_fixes language pack and state the problem and possibly suggest an alternative unequivocal wording (or the two possible interpretations), to be corroborated/corrected by Helen upon advisement from the developer who wrote the string. This, I think, is one of the reasons for having this special en_fixes language pack and has contributed to improve Moodle for all languages.
But, as a translator myself, I sometimes wonder if my failure to guess the one right meaning could merely be my ancient, scarce and biased knowledge of English grammar and my lack of confidence; and I might decide to randomly choose one meaning and translate it accordingly, instead of risking exposing myself as a non-professional translator. We, humans, all may make mistakes; and I have received a few AMOS contributions by my fellow contrymen asking me to fix my wrong choice .
This has happened to me a few times and I wonder which should be the best method to deal with these difficult strings which could have two or more different meanings.
I think this could be an interesting subject to discuss among Moodle translators.